Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980

by Rick Perlstein

And also a call to “oppose federal registration of firearms” and strike down provisions in the Gun Control Act of 1968 that served “to restrain the law-abiding citizen in his legitimate use of firearms.” That had been inserted right before a paragraph decrying the “murderous epidemic of drug abuse” which “Mr. Carter, through his policies and his personnel, has demonstrated

“And so, in this 1980 Republican Platform, we call out to the American people: With God’s help, let us now, together, make America great again.” Senator Lowell Weicker of Connecticut called the platform “disgraceful,” sending a letter to

An “Anderson Republican” told the press, “I’ve lived through 1964. I didn’t like it, but I find this much worse. I feel they just don’t want the moderates in the

Nancy joined in the ritual bowling game played with an orange during takeoff. (“I had a sneaking likeness for the Reagan plane,” Theodore White told his diary. “There’s no fun in the Carter entourage.”)

But Reagan’s grievances with Bush extended far beyond that. Bush’s radio ads compared Reagan’s inexperience and cluelessness to Carter’s—“Can we afford the same mistake twice?” Bush’s performance in the Nashua debate convinced Reagan that the man who volunteered to become one of the youngest fighter pilots in the World War II Navy was a coward. (Future campaign chroniclers

As for Bush, the Texan was said to still be simmering from Reagan’s snub of his son’s 1978 congressional campaign. Even if he was offered the job, would he take

Twenty-two-year-old Donny’s script said that they had “just returned from an extensive world tour” where they had witnessed “the decline of the United States’ prestige and respect through the world.… I think we can safely say that all of us want to make America great again.… I am buying a home just like everyone else and I am paying the same high interest rates.” ABC News paid a visit to the trailer

and was able to arrive on time for a meeting with Reagan in his suite, alongside Paul Weyrich, Phyllis Schlafly, and Jerry Falwell. There, they warned Reagan that the right absolutely

could not accept George Bush, whom Phyllis Schlafly had told reporters would be “very hurtful to the ticket. There would be a great deal of people who would not vote.” Reagan assured them his pick would be suitably conservative.

to push Helms, Crane, or Kemp—terrifying all involved that if they couldn’t agree on one, Bush would wind up with the job. Which could get ugly, for a movement was forming among conservative delegates to walk off the floor if he did. Boardroom

Bush ate popcorn, watched the tube (“The first thing I’m gonna do as vice

president is crusade to stop the commercial from increasing in volume”), cast occasional timid

What would happen, Cronkite asked, “if they got up there on that platform and said, ‘It’s gotta be Gerald Ford’?” Ford conceded that it “would be tough” to turn down a draft to run for vice president. But he shook his head in a manner suggesting “no way” while he said it. Then,

Both were reported to have veritably gasped as Ford started laying down terms: “I really believe that in all fairness to me, if there is to be any change, it has to be predicated on the arrangements that I would expect as a vice president in a relationship with the president. I would

have to go there with the belief that I will be playing a meaningful role across the board in the basic and the crucial and the important decisions… so I have to, before I can even consider any revision in the firm position I have taken, I have to have responsible assurances.”

“So it’s got to be something like a co-presidency?” Gerald Ford seemed to like the sound of that. Power is a powerful drug. “That’s something Governor Reagan really ought to consider.… Neither Betty nor myself would have any sense that our pride would

What was more astonishing were the evolving terms: a thoroughgoing redefinition of the customary role of vice president. A text recording their understanding proposed that a Vice President Ford would head a White House “executive office,” supervising both the Office of Management and Budget and the National Security Council—serving, Greenspan explained, like a corporate “chief operating officer” with Reagan as the nation’s CEO. It would have been a veritable “co-presidency,” just like Ford told Walter

Now his two-year presidential journey had shrunken down to a round of speeches releasing his delegates to a man he despised, loyally giving credit to him for all his best ideas.

when Leslie Stahl appeared amid the waving flags and banners and bellowing delegates and blaring band and announced, “I am just being told by a high lieutenant that the choice is”—her eyes bulged out—“Bush!” Walter Cronkite mock-buried his face in his cuff links: “Well, who’s writing the script for this one—that’s what I wanna know!”

The upshot was the same: Ford entered Reagan’s suite and told him that the whole thing just couldn’t work. After Ford left, according to one account, Reagan asked for the phone. According to one account, he also “grimaced.”

From the adjoining room, the Bush retinue heard their man eagerly pledge to support every jot and tittle of a platform containing all manner of propositions he had been running around the country denouncing as absurd. Then he put down the phone. His whoops mixed with those of his staff and friends suddenly rushing into his suite, which was lonely no more.

would triumph with Democrats. It was why he always bragged of being the first presidential candidate who had also been a union president, and that he still carried with him his union card.

But when a reporter for a Chicago-based socialist newspaper wandered forty miles up I-94 to the industrial suburbs of Macomb County, the unemployed Chrysler employees he met in a workingman’s bar were all voting for Reagan; the Democrats, they said, were just interested in handing out welfare to lazy Blacks instead of helping people like them. His editor refused to print the dispatch. He didn’t want to believe his beloved proletariat could “think like Archie Bunker.”

those people in the world who yearn to breathe free?” He recited a roll call: “Jews and Christians enduring persecution behind the Iron Curtain. “The boat people of Southeast Asia, of Cuba, and of Haiti. “The victims of drought and famine in Africa. “The freedom fighters in Afghanistan. “And our own countrymen held in savage captivity.” This part was a deception, that all this was “not a part of” his speech. It was right there in its first draft, and worked over carefully ever since. (The first clause had originally only mentioned Jews

confess that I’ve been a little afraid to suggest what I’m about to suggest.” (He looked like he was about to mist up.) “I’m more afraid not to. Can we begin our crusade, joined together, in a moment of silent prayer?” Ten seconds later, he said, “God bless America,” and the ovation went on and on and on. The

THERE IS A SAYING: CONSERVATIVES seek converts, liberals seek heretics. And: Democrats fall in love; Republicans fall in line. Of course, who falls in love can fall out of love.

also said, “Democratic policies have not failed these last four years. They have not been tried.” Six days later, the precise method by which Kennedy intended to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat was revealed. There was a meeting between the two campaigns to head off a divisive fight over the platform. There,

agreed to become one of the three hundred delegates that it would take to peel off from Carter if they were to win on F-3C, they needn’t exercise their newfound freedom by nominating him. There had by then emerged an exploratory committee for Senator Scoop Jackson, led by Hubert Humphrey’s 1972 national finance chair (Kennedy promptly announced

New York, both Governor Carey and Mayor Koch announced that they supported the idea; then Senate Majority Leader Byrd. But ABC News kept an ongoing tally: even though Harris found 58 percent of Democrats and independents nationwide wanted someone other than Carter as the Democratic nominee, they couldn’t find a single delegate who’d say on the record that they intended to vote down Rule F-3C.

delegates from North and South Dakota partied at the Dakota, where John Lennon and Yoko Ono lived. Donald Trump—whose Grand Hyatt opened in time to house delegates, though his promised “most spectacular building ever built” on Fifth Avenue was so badly beyond schedule that he had two hundred undocumented Polish immigrants working demolition in twelve-hour shifts without gloves, hard hats, or masks—cohosted the Texas delegation

He told his staff not to make any further compromises on platform language until he got his speech the next night into the convention record. His war would continue, by other

fifty-three-year-old horse-opera actor named Ronald Reagan” had campaigned against Medicare as “socialized medicine,” and that if John F. Kennedy had followed Edward

that was nothing compared to the witness everyone was waiting for. The previous day, a mere rumor that he was approaching the convention hall was enough to bring all other chatter to a standstill. Now Ted Kennedy approached the podium. But he couldn’t speak for a good twenty minutes. The tumultuous reception just wouldn’t die. When it did,

about the plank. He delivered the equivalent of an acceptance speech. People still talked about it decades later as one of the greatest addresses ever delivered at a national party convention. One part was exactly what you might have expected if Kennedy were accepting the Democratic nomination—flaying the hide off of the Republican nominee:

same Republicans who are talking about the crisis of unemployment have nominated a man who once

quote, ‘Unemployment insurance is a prepaid vacation plan for freeloaders.’ And that nominee is no friend of labor! “The same Republicans who are talking about the problems of the inner cities have nominated a man who said, and I quote, ‘I have included in my morning and evening prayers every day the prayer that the federal government not bail out New York.’ And that nominee is no friend of this city and our great urban centers across

about security for the elderly have nominated a man who said just four years ago that ‘Participation in Social Security should be made voluntary.’ And that ...

“And the same Republicans who are invoking Franklin Roosevelt have nominated a man who said in 1976, and these are his exact words, ‘Fascism was really the basis of the New Deal.’ And that nominee, whose name is Ronald Reagan, has no right to quote Franklin Delano Roosevelt!”

“For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die!” There followed an astounding thirty-eight-minute ovation—five minutes longer than the speech itself, which had been already interrupted for cheers forty-four times. As the acclaim for the rival he thought he had vanquished rose to a frenzy, President Carter became terrified he was on the verge of a runaway convention. And vague language on priorities was one

Thus did Jimmy Carter agree to run for reelection on a platform that asked for $12 billion in new spending, which he believed to be at direct cross-purposes with his fundamental economic goal—balancing the budget to fight inflation—which he had argued for as a national imperative in a speech six months earlier that announced $13 billion in new cuts. He had no choice, reflected DNC Chairman John White. “The mood of the house—well, it’s Kennedy’s night.”

There was nothing like the Neshoba County Fair. Every July, farm families from across the middle of the state moved into elaborate on-site two-story cabins for a week, enjoying card games, bull sessions, and romancing on the front porch and balcony all night long, after spending long days enjoying the midway, the livestock displays, country and gospel music, mule races, beauty contests, pie-eating contests—and the only legal horse racing in the state. White families, that is. Blacks only participated as employees. In the 1950s and ’60s, the fair was the place where

bodies of three SNCC voter-registration workers were discovered buried in an earthen dam a few miles away. They had been assassinated by the Ku Klux Klan, with the assistance of the local sheriff, Lawrence Rainey. And now Ronald Reagan was raising the curtain on his campaign there. Which raised more than a few eyebrows. White supremacist

1977, a small Klan unit led by Grand Wizard David Duke received a great deal of publicity for patrolling the Mexican border on horseback with weapons in an effort to halt border crossings, setting “punji traps,” camouflaged pits filled

May, an avowed Nazi got 43 percent of the vote in the Republican primary for North Carolina attorney general, winning forty-five of 100 counties, coming only seventy-five votes from taking the county encompassing Winston-Salem. (“There are many closet Nazis in the Republican Party. Most conservatives are closet Nazis,” he said. “If you scratch a conservative, you’ll find a Nazi underneath, just as if you scratch a liberal, you’ll find a Communist.”)

the head of the Urban League, Vernon Jordan, was shot while riding in a car with a white woman (it was the first story broadcast by CNN). Blacks suspected a racial motive, correctly: it turned out the shooter was a white supremacist who had shot several other interracial couples,

And here was Ronald Reagan, ducking in on what you might call one of their sacred sites. What was his campaign thinking? It was part of a strategy to signal that Republicans intended to seriously contest the South for the first time in over a century. Jimmy Carter’s Atlanta was

Congressman Trent Lott. Lott had been president of the fraternity that stockpiled a cache of weapons used to riot against the federal marshals protecting a Black student seeking to enter the University of Mississippi in 1962. Later, a defensive state party official insisted

believe in states’ rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level, and I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of government.” Then, he returned

from the usual Neshoba County Fair demagoguery, the way he carried out Trent Lott’s suggestion doused the enthusiasm of a previously energetic crowd.

He hated being accused of racism. A woman shouted: “What are you going to do for us?” Reagan cried back, hoarse, almost at the top of his lungs: “I am trying to tell you! That I know of no program, or promise that a president can make that the federal government can come in and wave a wand and do this! And I can’t do a damned thing for you if I don’t get elected.”